Shield/armor/health Priority?

[(XBOX)ballboy77]

I've been playing nearly 2 weeks now and starting to look at my build in a bit more detail. 

Out of shield, armor and health, is there one i should concentrate on more?

Currently i'm running Excalibur Lvl 30 with Shield 420, Health 540, Armor 71 

The armor part i've only just realised is so low. I have the relevant mod cards and can max them out if needed.

[Morec0]

Shields always seem to be the best go-to option, but on VERY rare occurrences (read: Valkyr or Despoil Nekros) health is more valuable.

 

Armor is a useless stat. Ignore it at all costs.

[Octoknightx]

You should generally only increase armor on warframes with high armor already like Valkyr or Rhino. You should focus on maxing shield. Shield will allow you to survive longer if you are careful and once you take damage to health you can use something like Life Strike to regain it. If you go for health then you will be constantly taking hp damage. Now for most frames I just go for both maxed but if you don't have enough forma or reactors to do this then choose wisely. Also if you notice that a warframe happens to have very low shields or health do not focus on the low one then. Like with Valkyr. Valkyr has crap shields so you should never upgrade them.

 

TL;DR: Generally focus on shield at first, then both shield and health. Armor is for frames that already have good armor.

[GinKenshin]

if you're running against infested then go for health, if you're running vs grineer then balanced the shield and health, for corpus go with shields, armor is kinda useless 

but certain frames require health/shield/armor more than health/shield/armor so keep that in-mind 

[Pythadragon]

Don't bother with armor unless you're Valkyr.

 

The meta is currently shifting to favor health rather than shields for a couple reasons:

 

- Slash and toxin/gas procs bypass shields completely and are now fairly common.

- It makes a healing support frame's job much easier (healers have more time to heal!)

- Health regen tools like lifestrike + melee are much more effective at short term sustainability (immediate survivability boost!) than waiting for shields to recharge

 

For these reasons I run health rather than shields on my volt, even though he'd have more total hitpoints if I gave him extra shields instead.

Edited December 19, 2014 by Pythadragon

[(PSN)Fac3kick3r_lolz]

Excalibur. Your better off getting both Health and shields. Remember theres ways enemies can bypass your shields and directly damage your health.

Edited December 19, 2014 by (PS4)Fac3kick3r_lolz

[Rydian]

Various attacks bypass shields and a broken health pool kills you while a broken shield pool doesn't... so for many cases, health is more important than shields if you're facing attacks that can bypass it (like toxin from infested).  On the other hand factions like the Corpus tend to not do shield-bypassing damage often and shields are still a buffer against most attacks so don't ignore shields entirely.

 

As for armor, it depends on the frame's base armor.  In general only frames that have an above-average amount of armor are considered worth using the slot for this, since the buff is based on the initial stat and in cases where the frame's armor is average or below, stacking health can give a bigger effective damage-soaking pool.

[(PSN)Fen_Integrum]

This entirely depends on your mods, and the frames you have at your disposal. Someone like Ash, for instance, is one of the better health tanks in the game. If you have Rage, Quick Thinking, and maybe a Flow, as well as a Life Strike Mod, you will effectively turn him invincible. If you have Trinity, and you dont do a Rage build, you need to have your head checked. She needs no mods to restore as much health as she needs. 

 

What can we do to improve shields in Warframe? 1) Recharge 2) Recharge faster 3) Recharge a lil bit faster, and you have a 1 in 5 chance to not be knocked down. Neat. 

 

So when Health Tanking, you can sit there, and allow your enemies to pummel you as much as they want, and you are only getting enough energy to keep killing them as fast as they are trying to kill you, especially with Oberon. With Nekros, it enhances his survivability, and even for those people with a serious lack of vision, and only use him to Desecrate, a Health Tank Build is a Desecration Battery. With Trinity, again, anybody that doesn't health tank with her needs to have their head checked; If you let her be reduced to 2 health, she has gained over 250 energy, and it takes as little as 25 of that energy to restore her health to maximum, but honestly, you could run her with no efficiency, and Blind Rage if you wished, and she'd still be able to keep the team afloat, though it'd be silly to run that way, IMO.

 

With Shield builds, you have to flee in order to recover your defenses, or have a Sentinel/Raska Kubrow that is more reliable than the game actually intended. Dont get me wrong: They've gotten me out of several pinches, but ultimately, its nowhere near as reliable as Health Tanking.

 

Lets look at the Shield Frames:

 

Frost: Great Shields, but with a snow globe, his shields are basically a second tier of health. His shields are more useful because they synergize well with Snowglobe, in that he can slow enemies to regenerate them. 

 

Hydroid is a good shield user, in that he can regenerate his shields undisturbed in Undertow.

 

Mag, who is essentially the Warframe version of Magneto (And I think many of us know how awesome Magnetos shield is), can restore her shields as fast as she would like to, provided she has the energy to do so, but one Toxic Ancient can end all of that. EDIT: It should also be noted that, Crush, a power that could be useful in a pinch to save her when her shields are down, does nothing to anything it doesn't manage to kill. As soon as the power is resolved, they are on their feet, firing their weapons again as though they had never stopped. This does not work well with someone with Shields.

 

Rhino is really only an honorable mention due to the fact that his Shields are higher than his health by 50 starting out, which leads to seriously high shields once maxed. This is somewhat irrelevant, though, due to the fact that he has Iron Skin. In addition, Rhino could still benefit just as much from Health Tanking, but it would be redundant, as he could then have up to 4 tiers of health: 1) Rhino Skin 2) Shields 3) Health 4) Energy (Health Tank Build).

 

Volt, my main man, my first Warframe love, and my preferred method of wrecking the solar system, is tied for the highest shields in the game. He has terrible armor, and so his health goes about as fast as can be. So what saves him when his shields go down? He can run away better than any other frame. 

 

Zephyr is also an honorable mention. You can still health tank with her. Some would call this a mistake, due to her terrible armor rating, but with a vitality, she can have some of the highest health in the game, at 1,110. This is without Vigor. I only mention her because her shields can match that, with her having the highest base stats for health and shields that this game provides. The utility is lost in this, due to her great mobility. If you have Turbulence, and are smart enough to not stand still, few shots will hit you.

 

Six of Twenty Eight Warframes And that's it. There are no other frames where the shields are higher than the Health. In the case with the frames that have equal health and shields, it will always take them further to health tank, and yes, that even goes for the squishy frames.

 

So what is the common thing among all of them? They all have a built in power that suppliments their shields, and without those powers, their shields would be much less useful. With Frost, Snowglobe makes them useful. With Mag, Shield Polarize makes them useful. With Rhino, Shields are redundant for two reasons 1) Iron Skin, and 2) He could stroll in with a Decaying Key, and a health tank build, and do better than with shields. With Volt, he can run away to regenerate them, and with Zephyr, she has a combination of Volt and Rhinos ways of making it useful, being both mobile, and having an added defensive measure that keeps her standing.

 

So every Shield frame is only worth putting shields on because they have a power that keeps shields afloat. That is how underwhelming they are.

 

In addition, Shield Restores are so useless it's literally silly to even make them. If I didnt have over a cool million Nano Spores, I wouldnt have wasted the resources on them. If one has the luxury of standing still enough to make use of a Shield Restore, they most likely can just wait for their own regen to kick in. By the second pulse, it's regenerating on it's own.

 

Until you get mods like Rage, Quick Thinking, and Life Strike, stick with shields, but make the switch as soon as it's possible. You can take any frame, straight out of the foundry, slap a rage build on it, and be as good at surviving as any Shield frame.

[DeathR34PER]

As a beginner/starter, always deal with Health and Shield, Armor is completely useless unless you are using Valkyr due to her HIGH amount of Armor.

 

To increase it further, either find other Warframes  you are comfortable to use or keep on upgrading your mods. Vitality for Health, Redirection for Shield, and Vigor is BOTH Health AND Shield. If you're afraid that your shield isn't recharging fast enough to certain situations, there are mods that can fix that, which is Fortitude (Knockback Resistance and Shield Recharge) and/or Fast Deflection (Shield Recharge Only).

[Venus-Venera]

for EXCAL: mostly only Shield mods.

 

if you can heal your self: HEALTH then Shield.

you don't need ARMOR most of the time. only few warframes require it (like valk. or frost for his frost globe)

[xyLoneZ]

Armor is only worth the slot on 2 frames, Frost and Valkyr.

 

As for Health VS Shield, the one that scales higher is usually better. If they scale the same, shield is usually better, unless you have ways to regen your HP back up (Regenerative Molt, Blessing, etc).

 

Some skills may change the way you decide which one is better though. On Mesa, for example, I build Redirection instead of Vitality because of I try to keep my Shatter Shield on all the time.

[Dorvarich]

+1 for whichever has a higher base between shields and health.

 

But if the frame in question is balanced between shields and health, IMO you're better off going for the health. There are two reasons for this: the first is the Rage mod, which converts health damage taken into energy - very convenient for getting enough energy to pop a panic skill when it's most needed, and great when paired with a channeling melee build with Life Strike.

 

The second, and more important one, is the presence of slash procs and toxin damage/toxin procs, all of which go straight through shields. Especially in higher-level missions against Infested or in the Void, a higher health pool is the only way (besides getting healed) to survive the poison damage from a Venomous Eximus' aura.